Fill, Empty, Stack, Hold: Art With a 6-Sided Object

Andrea Miller’s ‘Fold Here’ Is Performed by Gallim Dance

Fold Here The Gallim Dance Company in this Andrea Miller work at Montclair State University.Credit
Ruby Washington/The New York Times

MONTCLAIR, N.J. — As a prop, the cardboard box — like that old standard, the folding chair — holds myriad theatrical possibilities. It can be a container for smaller things, a building block for larger ones. It can be hoisted, flung, crumpled, collapsed, climbed inside of, jumped on top of. It calls up metaphors like “boxed in” and “outside the box.” And, while mundane, it has a certain intrinsic mystery: what’s inside?

In Andrea Miller’s “Fold Here,” which had its world premiere at the Alexander Kasser Theater here on Thursday, nine dancers extracted meaning after meaning, function after function, from that six-sided object. If only there had been enough to sustain the hourlong production.

While much of this work is finely constructed — and all of it is heroically danced by Ms. Miller’s Brooklyn-based Gallim Dance Company — it suffers from both long-windedness and a sense of instructions too carefully followed, even at its most chaotic. It’s precisely when Ms. Miller tries to make a mess that you feel as if she were folding on the dotted line.

The work, presented by Peak Performances at Montclair State University, opens with a fluorescent flash and a lone dancer loping across the stage, soon joined by others, to a thunderous soundscape. (Robert Wierzel designed the shapely lighting; Andrzej Przybytkowski compiled and composed the eclectic score.) It’s the choreographic equivalent of “it was a dark and stormy night,” but compelling, nonetheless.

Between windswept passes, Ms. Miller’s protean dancers, made human by Jenny Lai’s handsome costumes, merge with the architecture: the bare back wall, a tower of boxes onstage, asking to be toppled. (Jon Bausor is credited with “set concept.”) Other cardboard structures spring up and fall apart, posing obstacles or providing shelter.

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Tal Rosner’s flat, geometric projections, displayed on two standing screens, contrast pleasingly with Ms. Miller’s contorted, space-eating movement. This is the first time that Ms. Miller, an enterprising young choreographer, has worked with designers and a composer from a project’s inception. The depth of the collaboration shows.

And yet, she tries to do too much. The raw, sculptural opening gives way to a predictable domestic drama between Caroline Fermin and Dan Walczak that brings to mind a certain Beyoncé lyric (“everything you own in a box”). It’s downhill from there.

Ms. Miller’s tendency to quote Ohad Naharin, the influential Israeli choreographer with whom she danced, is a well-worn topic. But once again, this work has frustratingly familiar moments. If you’ve seen Mr. Naharin’s “Three to Max,” you’ve essentially seen the part where Ms. Miller’s dancers, one by one, display individual body parts, as if to say, “Look, I have a forearm.”

Ms. Miller says she was inspired by Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral,” in which a blind man guides a sighted one to draw a cathedral. It’s the sighted man who feels disoriented. “Fold Here,” though not without its zany surprises, always seems to know right where it’s going. You almost wish it would lose its way — and let us get lost inside it.

“Fold Here” runs through Sunday at the Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University in New Jersey; peakperfs.org.

A version of this review appears in print on September 28, 2013, on Page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: Fill, Empty, Stack, Hold: Art With a 6-Sided Object. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe